There but for the Current
by SciFiDVM
Summary: After Annie leaves the CIA, she decides to stop fighting the current. She and Eyal reflect on where it's taken them. Takes place years after 3.16
1. Chapter 1

**Title: **There but for the Current  
**Show: **Covert Affairs  
**Summary: **After Annie leaves the CIA, she decides to stop fighting the current. She and Eyal reflect on where it's taken them.  
**Spoilers:** Takes place years after 3.16  
**Pairings:** Annie/Eyal… what else…  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** I own none of the characters, I make no money off of these writing, I'm just borrowing them for my own amusement and as a way to blow off the stress of my actual job.

**A/N: I've been working on this one bit by bit for a while now. These three chapters are all it's going to be. It's angsty and I finally accomplish something I've tried and failed to do twice before – killing off Eyal… and Annie… sort of. This one isn't exactly my usual style. If Next Tuesday and End Game are my Firefly and Buffy, this one will be my Dollhouse (yes, it's a Whedon metaphor). **

Annie takes a deep breath and walks along the dock to slip 510. She carries only a small travel bag and a bottle of the nicest red wine she could find along her way from the airport to the marina. The Flying Lavin is moored in its slip at the end of the long dock, bow pointed outwards and being bathed in the amber hues of the early setting sun. She steps on board without announcing herself. If she's right, the boat's occupant has been well aware of her approach for some time now. No one comes to greet her, but she suspects she knows where she will find him. She carefully makes her way to the boat's bow and finds two cushions laid out there, with Eyal seated on one of then, leaning back against the front of the cabin and basking in the day's last rays of sunshine. His skin is slightly more bronze in color than she remembers and the salt and pepper speckling of his hair and five o'clock shadow is beginning to contain more salt than pepper. It's then that she notices the empty pair of wine glasses seated next to him. He turns to look up at her and smiles his trademarked sincere yet cocky smirk. She rolls her eyes back at him and takes a seat on the cushion next to him. He wordlessly extends his hand towards her and passes her a corkscrew. She opens the wine and pours them each a glass before passing the corkscrew and one of the glasses back to him. He pockets the corkscrew and shifts the wine glass to his left hand. Then he extends his right hand, palm up into the space between them. Annie smiles at the gesture, holds her glass in her right hand, and places her left hand in his, intertwining their fingers. For now they sit silently, sipping their wine, enjoying the beautiful sunset over the sea before them, and think of nothing at all.

It had been seven years since he had quit Mossad and said goodbye to her in that Amsterdam train station. At first she had feared that it really was going to be a true goodbye for them, though she soon found that he was never that far out of reach. Just over six years ago, when a file of tainted intel from Henry Wilcox imploded her relationship with Auggie and left her stranded in Jordan, he had appeared amidst a storm of flash bangs and gunfire to once again save the day. She had seriously considered his renewed offer to join him on his boat at that point, but she still opted to return to Langley and deal with the fallout of following the path that Wilcox had steered her down. The peril she had been unnecessarily placed in sealed Henry's fate at the CIA and she eventually regained her place as the Campbells' favorite. It had taken time, but she and Auggie did reconcile their friendship and working relationship. However, such a breach of trust may be forgiven, but is never entirely forgotten. There was no salvaging their romantic relationship.

Eyal intermittently reappeared in her professional life over the next five and a half years to drop cryptic warnings, help her out of tight spots, and point her in the direction of situations she could impact for a greater good. It wasn't unlike the first three years of their encounters, except that now they intentionally sought each other out when the necessity arose. While it strengthened their trust over the years, Annie had to admit that there were times when she missed that feeling she got when she stepped into a crowded room searching for an unknown potential threat, only to find Eyal sitting at the bar. Kismet, he had called it. There was something comforting about the way that the universe, or his beloved current, seemed to enjoy randomly thrusting them together. For the past few years she had realized that the only time she had felt the fateful pull of the current was as she swam against it each time she told him goodbye.

Then four months ago an op in Berlin went completely sideways. Assets died, deep cover operatives had their covers blown and went scattering to ground, and Annie nearly didn't make it out alive. It hadn't been her fault, but it had been a wake-up call. Her time at the CIA had come to an end. As she completed her exit paperwork, she couldn't help but feel the gentle tug and nudge of the current directing her once again after so many years.

Darkness creeps cross the horizon and a slight chill blows in the air as the stars begin to appear overhead. He turns to her with a sober look and breaks the silence. "I heard about Berlin. You could have called."

"Then odds are that one of us would be sitting here alone. It was a cluster. There was no logic or reason as to who made it out of there, just pure luck."

"And that was enough to make you quit?" He asks earnestly.

"You see, there was this guy I used to know. He's always been kind of like a mentor to me since I started with the CIA. I learned a lot from him about spycraft, but more so it seemed like every time I would need advice, encouragement, or someone to relate to the difficulties I was having dealing with a life of espionage, he would magically appear and do or say something that made it all make sense again."

"This friend of yours sounds like a very wise man." He smiles at her.

"And then after years of thinking that he was the perfect operative, the archetype of the company man, he taught me what was probably the single most important thing I would learn as a spy. It was the thing that no one else ever even talked about - knowing when it was time to walk away. I got back from Berlin and realized that it was time."

"So you decided it was also time to take up sailing?" He asks knowingly.

"Growing up, my dad was in the military, so I always ended up moving around when he'd get reassigned. I hated not having a say in it. As soon as I could, I wanted to call the shots. Turns out that the harder I tried to control my life, the more I kept putting it into the hands of other people. This time I decided to stop trying to force things. I just let the river take me where it would."

"And where has this river taken you?"

"The same place it always has."

"Funny how that happens." He squeezes her hand gently.

"A wise man once told me that the current may know something you don't. I'm starting to think he may have been right." She looks softly into his eyes.

That is all he needs from her tonight. It has been a long road between them. A lot of things have gone unsaid at different times over the past decade, but now is not the time to say them. Time is the one thing they now have. And they have each other, of course. He marvels at how far they've come since the current first thrust them together all those years ago, and how many minuscule things had to go right or wrong, exactly as they had, for them to have met the way they did and end up where they are now. _There but for the grace of the current,_ he thinks and smiles back at her.

He pulls on her hand and she joins him on the same cushion. She stretches out next to him and puts her head on his chest. He wraps an arm around her shoulders and they both fall asleep to the sounds of the water gently lapping against the Flying Lavin's hull and the feel of a soft sea breeze on their skin.


	2. Chapter 2

Eyal groaned. He liked Corfu as a travel destination. He'd sailed into the nearby harbors often enough when he'd been able to find the time to visit his very neglected Mariner. But as a location to be stranded with an asset with a potentially blown cover, he absolutely hated it. He always hated working island communities. They were isolated enough that people were generally familiar with each other, which made it difficult to find places to hide or to go to ground. Major traffic on and off most islands, including this one, was typically routed through a set of ferries. The last of which going from Corfu to Athens was scheduled for a time they were going to come precariously close to missing. Another overnight stay would leave him and his asset as sitting ducks for the fourteen hours until ferry traffic resumed. He felt for the man, possibly even related to him somewhat, but he was not in the business of putting himself in the direct path of undue danger for other people. He had a very specific skill set, which Mossad understood and took distinct advantage of. Since this mission did not involve any vulnerable women requiring careful seduction, that meant that the people out hunting his asset were as deadly as he was. He did not like the idea of giving skilled assassins any more of an opportunity to complete their mission than he already had.

Yet somehow, despite the danger, he found himself sitting in his car in the harbor parking lot considering intentionally missing this last ferry. Perhaps he could sympathize with the man's custody battle and the very real chance that he would never see his daughter again. He understood the pain of only knowing one's child from a distance and rare supervised visits. As the asset argued on his phone with his ex-wife, Eyal heard his phone chirp from the center console of his rented car. He was surprised to see that the voicemail had come through, as he was fairly certain he never had service anywhere near this particular island on his personal cell phone – one of the reasons he chose it as a travel destination.

He entered his PIN number and the message played into his ear. He groaned again as his ex-wife's voice rang into his ear, reminding him that tonight at eight pm was Avi's school play, and that his son expected him to be there. He had completely forgotten. He checked his watch and realized that if they caught this last ferry at four o'clock followed by the 5:15 flight to Tel Aviv that they were scheduled for, he could still drop the asset off at King Saul Boulevard and make it to the school in the nick of time. While he felt bad for the man seated next to him in the car, he was not about to miss a chance to see his own son if he could help it. He pondered what a lucky twist of fate it had been that that the voicemail had gotten through. He snapped the other man's flip phone shut in the middle of his conversation and dragged him to the waiting ferry.

…

The next morning Eyal arrived at Mossad headquarters a bit earlier than usual. He was in a good mood after getting to see his son the night before, and it gave him a renewed vigor that he hoped would last at least the rest of the week. No one else from his department had arrived yet, so he was surprised to see one of the computer monitors illuminated in the section of cubicles that the more junior operatives and technical analysts occupied. He walked over to investigate and quickly realized that the computer was being accessed remotely. He pulled the ethernet cable from the back of the computer tower immediately and dialed Rivka's personal cell. They obviously had a problem.

Within a few hours, a team of analysts, profilers, and interrogators had discovered the culprit. A Mossad deep cover operative named David Klein had apparently gone rogue and was attempting to gain information to intercept an American intelligence package that was due to be traded in a brush pass in Zurich later that week. Eyal spearheaded the tactical team that entered Klein's safe house and took him out before he could put his plan into motion.

…

Annie smiled into her cell phone. "Yeah, that and they're cute, dependable, and when you're feeling low they bring you booze. Oh wait, there's my contact. I gotta go." Annie spotted a short heavy set man with a lime green rubber bracelet on his right wrist and carrying a metal briefcase. He gave a subtle nod in her direction when they made eye contact. She walked over toward a stand of pamphlets next to the pay phone the man sat down in front of. He sat his briefcase down on his right, and she put hers down immediately next to it on her left. The paunchy man hung up the phone, reached down, took the handle of the case closer to Annie, stood, and left. Annie picked up the remaining case and walked back towards her gate. Despite the last minute change in wrist band color from orange to lime green, for what reason Annie could only speculate, everything went smooth as silk, and Annie was cramped back into the economy seats of her return flight to DC with her different but equally mysterious metal briefcase before she even had a chance to buy a souvenir.

…

About a year later, Annie frustratedly got in a cab and headed back to her Parisian hotel room alone. She had brought Selma Devrient to the museum gala as a way to bond with the young women and hopefully breach the subject of turning her into an American asset at the Syrian embassy. Instead, not twenty minutes into the evening, she got ditched. Turns out that the guy from the museum that Selma had hooked up with the night before had shown up at the party and wanted to go another round. Apparently Annie's company just couldn't compete with that of Mr. tall, dark, and handsome. Selma had attempted to point him out to Annie across the busy dance floor when she apologetically informed her that she was going to be ducking out early after an awkward run-in with a co-worker from the embassy. Annie had looked in the general direction, but didn't care if this "George" had actually been George Clooney standing across the room. She was too pissed to even give the man a passing glance.

The next day she tried calling Selma, under the guise of wanting her to dish about her romp with the sexy new boy-toy. When Annie's calls went unanswered throughout the day she eventually went to her apartment to check on her. She found Selma's body in her ransacked apartment, her purse missing. She had nothing.

Except for the nearly twelve thousand dollar handbag, Annie returned to DC empty handed. She felt horrible about the lies she had told Danielle, and found herself having trouble reconciling the pain her secrecy would inevitably cause her family with any trivial amount of good she might be doing for her country. It was possibly the worst birthday she could remember.

That year Chemical Kanaan perpetrated three major terrorist attacks that claimed the lives of thirty-eight people and injured dozens more. He remained a ghost amongst intelligence agencies, no one having even the slightest idea what he looked like.

…

Later that year Annie found herself more than slightly peeved as she hung up the phone with Auggie and entered the bar Agent Rossabi had directed her to. What had she been thinking, expecting that she could actually have a normal life for one night? Ok, her blind date's proclivity for bluegrass music was a touch odd, but he had seemed pretty nice otherwise. Maybe he wasn't Mr. Right, but he could have been Mr. Right Now. Instead, right now she felt like the last single person on earth. Even Auggie had started seeing his old Army buddy's sister. Her personal life was a bona fide mess. Her sister had kicked her out and she felt more alone than ever.

She looked around the bar and found the table at the back corner empty. She took a seat at the bar and scanned the crowd. No one stood out as an obvious CIA imposter, but she wasn't exactly sure what such a person would look like. She surveilled the booth in question until it was obviously forsaken and a group of rowdy college kids commandeered it. Agent Rossabi wasn't exactly excited about the bad news, but she wasn't sure what he had really expected from her. She asked up the chain as high as she could the next day at work, but got nothing. When she called to tell Rossabi at the end of the day, he informed her that his informant had been found dead after a car bomb exploded under an overpass that afternoon.

The next morning the DPD was a buzz with excitement when Annie arrived. That morning, the cleaning crew at an upscale downtown hotel found two bodies shot to death in one of their rooms. The excitement centered around the fact that one of the deceased, a John Doe, was flagged by facial recognition software when his morgue photo was put into the system. His identity was confirmed as Fouad Saeed, a Yemeni hit man, code named "Cardinal", suspected to be responsible for a Golan Heights terrorist attack that nearly derailed peace talks in 2002. He was a prominent figure on Interpol's most wanted off and on over the past decade. While everyone in the office seemed relieved that a dangerous terrorist had been taken out of the mix for good, there were many unanswered questions. How had he gotten into the US? Did he have plans for a terrorist attack that may still be in play? What did this terrorist have to do with the other victim in the hotel room? The second body had been identified via documents found in the hotel room as the registered occupant, a Greek national that worked as an antiquities dealer. He was here to look at procuring some sculptures for a private buyer, and had no suspected ties to any terrorist or politically motivated groups. Some people were questioning why an art dealer would be carrying a gun, let alone that he would be able to get a fatal shot off at a world renowned terrorist. Some discreet inquiries were made, but no other agencies claimed affiliation with the man that would go to his grave as George Yakkos.

Annie stared at the morgue photograph of George Yakkos for a while that evening before finally leaving the office. She was one of the people with no doubt that the dead man was a competing agency's spy. The timing with Rossabi's faux CIA agent was too coincidental. Not to mention that his cover story was nearly identical to her own. She couldn't help but sympathize with him. Something had driven this man to come after Cardinal, likely against the wishes or orders of his agency. Now he had been completely disavowed for his decision to put his personal life above his work. Would she ever be capable of that? She didn't find it implausible that she could one day go on a vengeful suicide mission against CIA orders. If someone killed Danielle, her nieces, someone she loved… she supposed she could end up alone in some foreign country, captured or killed with no one willing to claim her. She marveled at how easily, there but for the grace of fate, she could be this man, this George Yakkos.

Something about his name stayed with her through her drive home that night. As she attempted to sleep on the dilapidated futon in her empty safe house, she couldn't get the image of the dead man, that had likely been so tall, dark, and handsome in life, out of her head. Then suddenly a synapse fired and she wondered. The man courting her potential asset in Paris before her death had been an art aficionado named George. Would he have used the same cover on other ops? Could it have been the same man? Had this man been out there the whole time? Her counter-part from another country running the same ops, attempting to turn the same assets? How many times had she passed this man in an airport, a bar, or a ballroom and never known him, never suspected him, never realized how much they shared? She now mourned for this man. She didn't know him, but she suddenly felt like some very integral part of her life was missing. Somewhere out there had been someone that knew exactly what she was going through, struggled with the same missions she did, would have understood all the things about the way this job affected her that her family and coworkers just didn't get. She hadn't been alone. As she searched for a way to describe the loss she was feeling, she found that the English language just didn't seem to have the words to adequately convey the profound loneliness she now felt. Something had been taken from her, a part of her, someone with whom she shared the essence of who she was, someone that would have brought light into the lonely darkness of her life. She didn't know what made her think of it, but a Hebrew term came to her mind at the description. Neshama. It was perfect. She had lost her neshama without even knowing he had existed. That night she wept until she fell asleep.

…

Annie's lack of zeal for her work only worsened over the next few months. After her job nearly got her sister killed on their vacation and culminated in her having to take a life, she nearly decided to quit. The only reason she stayed was because she didn't know how to leave. The CIA taught its operatives how to deal with stress and disappointment, not how to draw a line determining how much they were willing to tolerate. Her frustration only grew. She had moved back in with Danielle, and that was her only salvation.

When Annie met Jai in the diner the morning of the Fourth of July she felt less patriotic than at any time she could remember, despite all the little flags and decorated cupcakes. When he presented her with possible proof of corruption amidst their ranks, she didn't hesitate for a second. She followed him readily when he recommended he take her somewhere to show her the data he had compiled. She got in next to him and buckled her seat belt as he turned the ignition.


	3. Chapter 3

Annie woke with a start. Fireworks are going off over the water near the horizon. The pyrotechnics are eerily similar to the explosion in her dream.

"The Olympics are this coming Summer. They are celebrating the lighting of the first torch." Eyal whispers into her ear as he smoothes her hair.

"It's beautiful." She calms notably at his words and soft touch. A few minutes pass before she asks, "Have you ever wondered how different your life could be if one simple insignificant choice in your life had been different?"

He looks at her and knows the dream she has just had. He had it himself routinely after he quit Mossad. "You're wondering what would have happened if I had caught that ferry."

"How did you…" she trails off. The look in his eyes is knowing, and she realizes that he knows because he has been there, because they have shared so much, because she has become him. "How does your 'what if' end?"

"At first it was Kanaan or Cardinal depending on the night." He takes a deep breath. "But in time, after we kept working together, I realized something. We were still working together. We had always worked together whether it was part of the job or not, sometimes when it directly contradicted our jobs." He turns slightly so he can look directly into her eyes. "Neshama, look at the improbability of us, our friendship. Whatever has happened between us is the product of so much more than a compromised brush pass. I have no doubt that if the current had not brought us together in Zurich it would have been another time and place. Then 'what if' became quite an intriguing concept."

"How does it end now?"

"Why don't you come inside with me and find out?" He sits up and offers her his hand.

She accepts it tentatively. "I'm not sure I'm ready to find out."

"That's the beauty of 'what if'. It can end any way you want."

"What if I'm not sure how I want it to end yet?"

"Did some very wise and very attractive man once give you some very good advice?"

She laughs and nudges his shoulder with hers once they are standing. "Let's see where the river takes us."

They walk into the boat's cabin hand in hand.

**A/N: Ok, it's over. I'm not sure that I love it, but it wasn't going to stop nagging at my brain until I got it out there. Don't worry… I'll go back to Next Tuesday now…**


End file.
